THE LAST TOAST
by Anna Akhmatova

I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our lonliness together;
and to you I raise my glass,
to lying lips that have betrayed us,
to dead-cold, pitiless eyes,
and to the hard realities:
that the world is brutal and coarse,
that God in fact has not saved us.

Copyright ©1973 Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. All rights reserved.